What happened
Virgin Galactic (SPCE 3.15%) stock is on the rise Monday, up 8.9% as off 12:05 p.m. ET. It's not too hard to figure out why.
Tuesday is earnings day, and investors are hopeful.
So what
Analysts have set the bar low for Virgin Galactic's second-quarter report. According to data from Yahoo! Finance, all it will have to do is report better than a $0.51 per share loss and more than $2.7 million in revenue to exceed expectations.
The earnings number shouldn't be too hard to beat. After all, last year in Q2, Virgin Galactic posted a $0.43 per share loss, so even if it does 19% worse this time around, that will be considered a win.
Nailing the revenue number could be a bit trickier. In the year-ago quarter, Virgin Galactic collected a mere $357,000 in revenue. Getting to $2.7 million would be a more than six-fold increase in quarterly revenue. And while it's true that the company successfully launched one revenue-generating commercial space tourism flight in Q2 (in June), it has not yet launched two such flights. Its second flight, Galactic 02, is expected to take off in August.
Meanwhile, at an estimated cost per ticket of $200,000, times three paying passengers on the flight, the revenue from Virgin Galactic's first flight, Galactic 01, may work out to as little as $600,000.
Now what
Did Virgin Galactic find a way to spin $600,000 worth of straw into $2.7 million in gold? Perhaps. The Galactic 01 spaceflight in June was performed for the Italian Air Force and carried their astronauts as passengers, and it's possible the Italian government paid more than just the cost of the astronauts' tickets for the flight.
We'll have to wait until Tuesday, though, to find out exactly how much more Virgin Galactic may have collected for that flight. The good news is: The more we learn about the company, its revenues, and its profit margins, the better we'll be able to predict when Virgin Galactic might turn profitable at last.
